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Reacting to the blue fire wall collapse

NILES, Ohio -- Challenging Nancy Pelosi's dominance of the House Democratic caucus is exceptionally difficult. But for her onetime protégé Tim Ryan, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Ryan just won an eighth term, but Trump cleaned up around here. A Republican had not carried Trumbull County, where the congressman lives, since Richard Nixon in 1972. Just four years ago, Barack Obama won it by 23 points. Donald Trump prevailed by seven points.

"That changed my entire world view," Ryan said of the 30-point swing. "That rocked me. As I saw the blue fire wall collapse, I was like: I need to step up. ... I need to be a bigger voice in the party."

The 43-year-old made the comment during a nearly hour-long interview Saturday evening at the Starbucks near his house, where he and his wife have three kids and two dogs. He arrived in a silver Chevy Suburban, unaccompanied by staff. He was 10 minutes late because he had been on the phone with Kathleen Rice, a freshman from New York. She had just agreed to publicly support his bid. Ryan wore white tennis shoes, jeans and a fleece with the logo of the United Auto Workers.

-- He spoke candidly about how hard it is to ramp up for a leadership battle. "Where are the phone numbers? That's literally where we

started," Ryan said. "We had to piece a list together, which was interesting.

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I've finally got 'em!"

Now comes the hard part: Getting nearly 200 House Democrats on the phone and convincing at least half to turn on the powerful Pelosi, who has a lot of chits to call in from the 14 years she's been in charge. Ryan has until Nov. 30. "It's a really big vote," he said he's telling each of them in his pitch. "Two hundred Democrats can determine whether we go in a new direction or stick with the status quo."

-- History is not on his side. The last time a top House party leader went down in a contested election was 1964, when Gerald Ford beat Charlie Halleck to become the Republican minority leader.

-- Since coming to Congress in 2003, Ryan has earned a reputation in Ohio as a rising star who always gets cold feet. Over the past decade, he's considered bids for Senate, governor and lieutenant governor before opting to keep his safe House seat. That's why the conventional wisdom -- wrong so often in 2016 -- was that he would not go through with a frontal challenge to the 76-year-old Pelosi.

But the shellacking Democrats took here in the Mahoning Valley, the epicenter of the Rust Belt, was just that bad. At the very least, Ryan wanted to spark a conversation. "Initially, I didn't think of myself to run but thought we need a change in the spot," he explained. "Trump is president of the United States. We can't blame our voters. We clearly did something terribly wrong."

"If we don't have Barack Obama at the top of the ticket, we can't win elections," Ryan lamented. "That is an unsustainable model. He can't run again, so it's not even like we can say, well, every four years we'll win."

"Then it started to sink in more and more," he continued. "The Clintons are going to be gone, the Obamas are going to be gone, Harry Reid is gone and there's no one at the DNC. I saw the minority leader position, and I thought, after what just happened, I can't see how our current leadership could come into any of these states and advocate for a candidate we would need."

Ryan insists that he never had any ambition for this job. "You can talk to anybody who has talked to me in the last 14 years, and it never came out of my mouth that I wanted to run for leader," Ryan said. "If I had, I would have beefed up my leadership PAC and given more money!"

Ryan has friends, but he admits that there are a number of lawmakers who he does not know very well and never previously tried to befriend. "Because it wasn't my thing," he explained. "We're getting a good response though. There's a lot of openness to change. More so than many would expect."

Now he's got a folded copy of his whip list and a call sheet in his pocket. "I'm just banging away on the phone," he said, as he took a sip of a medium coffee with two shots of espresso poured in for an extra kick.

-- Pelosi has already declared victory. The San Francisco congresswoman said at a press conference last Thursday that she already has commitments from two-thirds of the caucus. Many major interest groups have lined up to publicly express support.

Ryan believes that the secret ballot works to his advantage, and he expects to get votes from members who Pelosi sees as solid allies. "I think she had two-thirds before somebody announced," Ryan said. "A lot of people will be reconsidering now that there's actually a race. I can already tell from the phone calls. A lot of people say, 'This is great. We're going to be with you. Just don't mention my name.' Everyone knows that happens. That's just the nature of the game."

That cuts both ways, however. As anyone who has ever been involved in a leadership battle will readily tell you, many members of Congress are two-timers. They'll tell both Pelosi and Ryan that they're voting for them. Only the member will know the truth.

-- Ryan describes Pelosi as a mentor and goes out of his way to stress that he doesn't take her on lightly. She's the only leader he's ever known in the House. He got elected and she succeeded Dick Gephardt at the same time. When he arrived, she hooked him up with a slot on the House Democratic Steering Committee, which he parlayed into a very valuable seat on Appropriations.

"I love her," Ryan told me. "I was a foot soldier for her. I'm not a Steny (Hoyer) guy. I'm a Nancy guy. So this is not like some vendetta where, 'We're going to plant Tim to put a chink in her armor and then have Steny come after her.'"

But Ryan hastens to add that he cannot let his personal affinity for "Nancy" blind him to the plight of the party. Democrats have more than 60 fewer seats than they did in 2010, and the party has controlled the House for just four of the past 22 years -- despite holding the White House for 14 of them.

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